Learn the process of adding additional elements to a business card design, such as how to resize frames and copy existing text to maintain consistent font and size. This article also provides insight into managing overset text, changing text size, aligning text, and creating text copies using keyboard shortcuts.
Key Insights
- The article provides a step-by-step guide to resizing frames in a business card design by selecting the frame and dragging its edges.
- It offers a method of copying existing text to maintain a consistent font family and size, and explains how to manage overset text or text that doesn't fit within a text frame.
- The article also describes how to create copies of text frames using keyboard shortcuts, and how to align and adjust the size of text within those frames.
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In this video, we're going to be adding additional elements to our business card. So let's begin first by selecting our bottom frame, and we're simply going to resize our frame.
We can do this by selecting the squares on the edge of the frame. In this case, we want to select our bottom frame and simply drag it up. Here we can see that we've now created less frame by dragging the bottom up.
While it doesn't necessarily hurt anything to have a bigger frame, I often like to select the frames and get rid of any excess frame. Now let's begin adding our other elements. While we could go back to our Type Tool, we can also copy the same text that we already have as a starting place since it has consistent font family and size.
To do this, we can select the text frame and hit CTRL + C on the keyboard to copy and CTRL + V to paste. Here we now have a third text frame, and let's take this text frame and, using Selection Tool (V) on the keyboard, we can select it and drag it to the bottom. In this text frame, we want to type the address.
Feel free to type your own address by double-clicking and beginning to type. In this case, while I've typed the entire address, it doesn't all show up. This is because we have overset text, or text that doesn't fit within this text frame.
In the case of this, what we want to do is utilize our Selection Tool, and from here, we want to simply click on one of the boxes and click and drag to the right. When we release, we'll see that we now have more of our text. I'll then hit CTRL and scroll down with the mouse to move to the right, and if we click and drag a little bit further, we'll see that we can fit almost all of the text.
However, if we see the red square with the plus in the middle, this indicates that we still have overset text. So while I could continue dragging this out and to the right, it's apparent that we need to change the size of this text. To do so, let's double-click into the text, and we're going to hit CTRL + A to select all the text—both the text shown as well as the text that isn't shown.
Next, we need to change the size. To do this, we can go up to our Control Bar, or we can go into our Properties Panel. From here, we're simply going to drop down the text size within our Character panel, and let's drop it down to nine points.
Also, for this text, let's align the paragraph to left. When we finish doing so, we can again hit CTRL + Shift + A to deselect, or we can use our Selection Tool to click outside so that we have no objects selected. Now that we've completed our address, let's add a phone number on the top left-hand side.
While we could again select this text box and hit CTRL + C and CTRL + V to copy and paste, there's another way. We can copy and paste by using the ALT key on the keyboard, and when we hold ALT, we'll see that we have two arrows indicating that if we click and drag, we'll create a copy. So let's release this on the top, and we'll see that we have a copy of this text frame or this object.
From here, let's double-click our text and hit CTRL + A to select it all. Finally, let's type in our phone number. When we've finished, we can utilize our Selection Tool and click outside since we have this object selected, and now we have nothing selected.
We can now click back on our object to select it, and let's reduce the size of our text frame to about this size. Finally, we now only have one more text object to add. Let's again hold ALT as we click on this object, and we'll drag it to the top right-hand side.
As we can see here, we have green lines indicating that this will be in line with the object on the left. Again, these are our Smart Guides, and they're helpful for making sure that things are in line. We'll release right about here, and let's triple-click this text until it's all highlighted or hit CTRL + A to select all, and from here, we're going to type out our company.
In this case, I'll type out VDCI. However, for this font right here, I want to select it all, and let's change it from Chivo Light, going to our Character panel within our Properties Panel. We're going to go to Chivo and click the drop-down where it says Light, and let's select Bold. Finally, we'll hit CTRL + Shift + A to deselect, and we'll see how this looks.
To get a preview of this rather than seeing all the guides and text frames, remember that we can hit (W) on the keyboard to see a preview. This looks pretty good. We have all the elements that we need; however, we still need to do a little bit of alignment.
So let's hit (W) again, and for now, let's save our work by hitting CTRL + S on the keyboard to save. In the next video, we'll add a few more guides and realign the various elements within our business card. See you there.